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Thursday, 1 November 2012

Monster House and Mo-cap

I watched a brief bit of the film 'Monster House' after hearing some things about it.

I heard positive things about it at first, albeit relating to its abandoning of the typical mo-cap/performance-cap thing of photo-realistic/photo-creepy characters and textures.
And in this way, yeah, it kinda works.

However, watching the film is a different thing altogether. It's true the motion is all very smooth but something isn't right. Somewhere between the actors not acting large enough, and the fact the detail of the movement in the face doesn't match that of the movement, creates characters that are creepy and kind of dead.

I don't know if part of it is because having seen lots of keyframe animation before we are used to seeing them move in a certain way, or whether performance-capture just doesn't work when used like this.
I think it might even go down to the fact that I'm seeing these characters move in such a convincing way that I'm assessing them as real people and they fail that test.

I would much rather watch a good piece of dreamworks or pixar animation than this, anyway.